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Khachiyan Tops Western States |
By Randy Hough | |
October 27, 2009 | |
The 27th incarnation of the Western States Open at the Sands Regency in Reno, October 23-25, was tinged with sadness. Jay Blem, a bookseller and then TD at the tournament for many years, had passed away suddenly a month before, and a moment of silence was observed in his honor. The turnout of 250 players approximated last year's, and a prize fund of about $29,000 was paid out. The Open section attracted no less than nine grandmasters and five IMs. As observed in our earlier report, upsets were in the air (yes, and lots of draws), and no one had more than 4 points going into the sixth and final round. Jaan Ehlvest and Alexander Ivanov drew quickly, and Eugene Perelshteyn and Sergey Kudrin were not far behind. That left the running to Ildar Ibragimov, who administered a severe defeat to young FM Steven Zierk (the only non-GM in the group), while Melikset Khachiyan was paired "down" with the Dutch GM Loek Van Wely. He triumphed in a tactical middlegame followed by an intricate ending: 3624 1.d4 d5 2.c4 c6 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Nc3 dxc4 5.a4 Bf5 6.e3 e6 7.Bxc4 Bb4 8.0–0 Nbd7 9.Nh4 Bg4 10.f3 Bh5 11.g4 g5 A recent move, found during a quick pre-game database perusal. 11...Nd5 and 11...Bg6 are well known. 12.Nf5 Bg6 13.e4 Qa5 14.Na2 exf5 15.exf5 0–0–0 16.fxg6 hxg6 17.Nxb4 Qxb4 18.Bxf7 Rdf8 19.Bxg6 Qd6 20.f4 Nxg4 Suffering from a headache, Khachiyan offered a draw. Trailing by a half point, Van Wely declined. 21.Qxg4 Qxg6 22.Ra3 Qd6 23.Rd3 Rfg8 24.Kh1 Rh4 25.Qg3 Rgh8 26.Rf2 g4 27.Re3 White's turn to offer a draw -- too late! 27...Qd5+ 28.Kg1 Rh3 29.Qg2 Qxd4 30.Qe4 Qxe4 31.Rxe4 g3 32.Rg2 gxh2+ 33.Kh1 Nc5 34.Re5 Nb3 35.Re1 Nxc1 36.Rxc1 Rf3 37.Rg4 Rf8 38.Rc4 Of course, White's king is too far away for the pawn exchange. 38...Rf2 39.b4 Rd8 40.Rg2 Rdd2 41.Rxf2 Rxf2 42.b5 Kc7 43.a5 Rb2 44.a6 Rxb5 45.axb7 Rb2 46.f5 Rf2 47.Rxc6+ Kxb7 And now Black's king will perform a delicate dance to escort the a-pawn down the board. 48.Rf6 a5 49.Rf7+ Kb6 50.Rf6+ Kb5 51.Rf8 Ka4 52.f6 Ka3 53.Ra8 a4 54.Ra6 Kb4 55.Re6 Kc4 56.Re4+ Kb3 57.Re3+ Kb2 58.Re6 a3 59.Rb6+ Kc3 60.Rc6+ Kb3 61.Rb6+ Kc4 62.Ra6 Kb4 63.Rb6+ Ka5 64.Rb3 a2 65.Ra3+ Kb4 66.Ra8 Rf1+ 0–1 And so there ensued a playoff (two ten-minute games…at 11 pm!) for the title of Western States Open Champion and a $100 bonus. Khachiyan won the first game against his better rested opponent, with Ibragimov misplaying an easily drawn ending. Though needing only a draw with White, Khachiyan won the second rapid game in style: 3623 Western States Open Playoff (2), 25.10.2009 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.e5 c5 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3 Ne7 7.Qg4 Kf8 8.h4 Qa5 9.Bd2 Qa4 10.Kd1 b6 11.h5 h6 12.Nf3 Ba6 13.Bxa6 Qxa6 14.a4 Nbc6 15.a5 c4 16.Qf4 Ke8 17.g4 Kd7 18.Ke2 Nxa5 19.Qxf7 Rhg8 Black figures to gain time attacking White's queen, but he's in for a big surprise! 20.Bg5!! hxg5 21.Nxg5 Rae8 22.Qxe6+ Kc7 23.Qd6+ Kc8 24.Ne6 Qb7 25.Rxa5! bxa5 26.Rb1 Rd8 27.Rxb7 Rxd6 28.Rc7+ Kb8 29.exd6 1–0 With another major title under his belt, the 39-year-old GM from Los Angeles (who once trained world championship contender Lev Aronian) confirms his place among our premier Swiss circuit players. Joining Perelshteyn, Kudrin, Ehlvest, and Ivanov in the 4 ½ group were FM Alexandre Kretchetov and IM Enrico Sevillano (now clearly America's top IM, after the ascension of Ben Finegold to GM). Enrico was one of Steven Zierk's upset victims (Round 4), but recovered and downed FM Andrew Karklins in the finale. And speaking of Andrew, here's his first round shocker over Ehlvest, which was referenced in our earlier article: 3622 Western States Open, Reno (1), 23.10.2009 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.d4 e6 3.c4 Bb4+ 4.Nc3 c5 5.g3 d6 6.Bg2 Nc6 7.0–0 0–0 8.Qd3!? cxd4 9.Nxd4 Ne5 10.Qc2 Nxc4 11.Qb3 Bxc3 12.Qxc3 Nb6 13.b3 Nbd5 14.Qd2 Qb6 15.Ba3 Rd8 16.Nc2 Nc7 17.Ne3 Nce8 18.Rac1 Bd7 19.Nc4 Qa6 20.Qa5 Bb5 21.Qxa6 Bxa6 22.Rc2 Rac8 23.Rfc1 b6 24.h3 Rc7 25.f4 Rdc8 26.Kf2?? White's pawn sac has not yielded the desired results. His pressure has dissipated, but it's still very much a game -- until this careless move leads to a deadly zwischenzug. 26...d5 27.Ne3 d4 0–1 (White loses a piece because Rxc7 dxe3 comes with check- the reason Kf2 was a blunder.) Zierk did split Under 2400 honors with Curt Collyer and GM Amon Simutowe, while the same 4-point score earned clear Under 2300 honors for Dana Mackenzie of Santa Cruz, CA. Class winners were many, as befits a tournament held in a casino. The first place winners included Expert: Paul Romero (trophy), Gary Huang, and Igor Margulis; A: Drayton Harrison; B: Galen Pyle (trophy), Taylor Bailey, and Daniel Rozenblatt; C: Daniel Moglen (trophy), Adam Baraz, Kerry Van Veen, and Matthias Grabiak; D: Michael Winters (trophy), Eric Isberg, and Eduardo Magan; and E/Unrated: Philip Dennis (trophy), Leland Moglen (Daniel's son), and Jeff Olson. The Quick tournament was the only event with a poor turnout, and IM Cyrus Lakdawala came up from San Diego to win with ease. Karklins' upset of Ehlvest was hardly the only case of experience topping youth. 93-year-old Daniel Litowsky won over seven-year-old Jeffrey Tao in the B section! Another tournament oddity: having warned that ten pushups would be imposed on cell phone violators, TD Jerry Weikel was the first to suffer the penalty. And though it's been many years since he was a Marine, he did them with ease. Semper Fi, Jerry, and remember – vibrate setting! Jerry's capable staff included Fran and Dana Weikel, Victor Flashman, Adam Searcy, Grant Fleming, and Sal Rosario. The Sands Regency tournaments (October and Easter weekend) offer many extras (coffee and pastry, name plates with state/national flags for the Open section and top five boards in the others, ten demo boards, lectures by GM Larry Evans, and a simul (Dmitry Gurevich did the honors this year). Consider making that trip to Reno! |


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Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- Nothing could have prepared me for what I'm about to see.
I'm in a fancy villa in a posh part of Tripoli, walking through the garden past a huge plastic children's swing set and a trampoline that dominate the lush green lawn. A young man is filling a large swimming pool.
All this in a city where water is running out. I've not had a shower or washed in running water for three days. The al-Megrahis, it seems, are not short of money.
This villa connects to another, equally palatial but far more contemporary. It's clad in modern ceramic tiles, like something you'd see in trendy London neighborhood.
As I walk up the grand staircase towards the front door, I'm mentally composing my questions -- what I'll ask Abdel Basset al-Megrahi first. Did you do it? Did Gadhafi give you the orders?
I've been waiting for the moment for a long time.
CNN Exclusive: Lockerbie bomber near death
When Pan Am Flight 103 was blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, I spent the night trying to get the first live pictures back to London and saw the first grainy images revealing the horror of what had happened. I'd covered Megrahi's trial in Camp Ziest in the Netherlands, a tiny patch of Scotland on Dutch soil created out of a compromise with Libyan ruler Moammar Gadhafi to get the trial in a Scottish court and begin Libya's long slow rehabilitation with the West.
A U.N. observer called the trial "a spectacular miscarriage of justice." Al-Megrahi pleaded innocent and always has said he wanted to clear his name. He knew more than came out the trial.
When he was released from a Scottish jail two years ago, on compassionate grounds, given only three months to live by doctors after serving eight years of a life sentence, it seemed that perhaps the time had come to learn his secrets.
A few weeks later, I saw him, and officials told me I might get to interview him. It was a lie. They had too much to hide and did their best to keep him away from journalists.
Now, with Gadhafi gone, the moment had come. His family invites me inside his home to meet him.
Through the doors, after the harsh sunlight, it's darker than I expect. My eyes quickly adjust, and I'm scanning the large hall looking for the gray-haired al-Megrahi.
The last time I saw him, he was in a wheelchair. He'd looked weak, worn out by meeting so many family and friends on his return, I was told.
But I thought at least we could have a conversation. Maybe it would be a little slow, but I am ready, my questions clear. We walk towards a rather grand staircase. Then, just as I expect to begin the climb, we turn abruptly left into a tiny, high-ceilinged room lined with red and tan wallpaper, patterned in the way elderly men seem to like in their studies.
I was expecting al-Megrahi to be in a comfy armchair, but he was not.
Where the chair might have been, in the corner facing the door, was a metal hospital bed -- the type with wheels that can raise and lower a patient's back. Beneath the blankets was al-Megrahi, eyes shut, inert.
At first I didn't know what to do. My carefully thought-through questions were useless. I was stunned. Was I being shown him so I would see with my eyes how sick he was? Should I try to talk to him?
I took in all I was seeing. The oxygen mask on his face, the old, sick lady -- his mother, I was told -- at his bedside, the drip hanging a foot from his head. His skin seemed paper-thin, his face sallow and sunken.
Was this all a drama for me? Was this real, or had they invited me after my 15-minute wait outside after the "stage" was set?
My fingers are fumbling on my camera. I'm still in shock. This was so much not what I was prepared for.
In the two decades since the bombing, which killed 270 passengers, crew and townspeople below, it seemed the secrets of the attack would die with the bombers. Al-Megrahi had promised to prove his innocence. With Gadhafi gone, I thought this could be the moment he points the finger of blame.
The air feels heavy in the room, silent aside from a quiet hissing from the oxygen bottle by the bed. Then his son Khaled speaks.
He tells me his father hasn't seen a doctor since they rescued him from a hospital before Tripoli fell to the rebels, whom he said looted all the medicine from their house
"We just give him oxygen," his son says. "Nobody gives us any advice. And some food by injection (drip) ... If you see his body he is weak."
As we speak, I watch to see if his father stirs. There is no movement. His eyes remain shut. Khaled keeps talking.
"What about demands he finish his sentence in Britain?" I ask.
"My dad, he's still in house," his son says. "If you send him to Scotland, he will die by the way. Here or there."
Although neither of us know it, at that moment, he'll soon be relieved. This evening, the National Transitional Council announces they'll leave al-Megrahi be and won't send him back to Britain.
The family wants me to leave. They are polite. We talk in hushed whispers. They'd told me when they first let me in that I had only two minutes to be with him, and it's been 10 already.
They want al-Megrahi to spend his last days in peace, they say, away from reporters and their questions. But before I leave, I must ask the toughest question of all: How much longer does he have left to live?
"Nobody can know how long he will stay alive. Nobody knows," Khaled says. His eyes droop. His face is drawn, too, his voice wavering and emotional. This is a family already grieving.
Whatever secrets al-Megrahi had will soon be gone. As I leave, I'm still shocked by what I've learned. The world is about to lose one of the few people who can piece together what really happened that dark, wintry night, 29,000 feet over Scotland.

subset: commoncrawl


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SOHO Instrumentation Page
SOHO has two modules, one of which holds 12 instruments. Each of these is used to study one of three areas of the Sun. The goals of the SOHO mission were to study the inner core and outer atmosphere of the Sun, as well as the origin of the solar wind. The main mission was completed in 1997, but the spacecraft is still in use.


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Author Keyword Title [ Year] Filters: First Letter Of Last Name is B and Author is Beadnell, Blair [Clear All Filters]
Disseminating contingency management: impacts of staff training and implementation at an opiate treatment program.. J Subst Abuse Treat. 46(4):429-38.
2014. .
2014. Multidimensional characterization of sexual minority adolescents' sexual safety strategies.. J Adolesc. 36(5):953-61.
2013. Social Services for Sexual Minority Youth: Preferences for What, Where, and How Services are Delivered.. Child Youth Serv Rev. 36(2):312-320.
2012. The long arc of recovery: characterizing intimate partner violence and its psychosocial effects across 17 years.. Violence Against Women. 17(4):480-99.
2011. Measuring multiple minority stress: the LGBT People of Color Microaggressions Scale.. Cultur Divers Ethnic Minor Psychol. 17(2):163-74.


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Jody Mills reluctantly attends a mandatory sheriff's retreat and is partnered with an overeager sheriff named Donna who wants to bond. Just as Jody thinks things can't get any worse, a body with just strings of meat and skin hanging off the bones is discovered. While the local sheriffs blame an animal attack, Jody knows better and calls Sam and Dean.
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The last decade has seen the transition from single-core processors to multi-cores and many-cores. This move has by and large shifted the responsibility from chip manufacturers to programmers to keep up with ever-increasing expectations on performance. In the single-core era, improvements in hardware capacity could immediately be leveraged by an application: faster machine - faster program. In the age of the multi-cores, this is no longer the case. Programs must be written in specific ways to utilize available parallel hardware resources.
Programming language support for concurrent and parallel programming is poor in most popular object-oriented programming languages. Shared memory, threads and locks is the most common concurrency model provided. Threads and locks are hard to understand, error-prone and inflexible; they break encapsulation - the very foundation of the object-oriented approach. This makes it hard to break large complex problems into smaller pieces which can be solved independently and composed to make a whole. Ubiquitous parallelism and object-orientation, seemingly, do not match.
Actors, or active objects, have been proposed as a concurrency model better fit for object-oriented programming than threads and locks. Asynchronous message passing between actors each with a logical thread of control preserves encapsulation as objects themselves decide when messages are executed. Unfortunately most implementations of active objects do not prevent sharing of mutable objects across actors. Sharing, whether on purpose or by accident, exposes objects to multiple threads of control, destroying object encapsulation.
In this thesis we show techniques for compiler-enforced isolation of active objects, while allowing sharing and zero-copy communication of mutable data in the cases where it is safe to do so. We also show how the same techniques that enforce isolation can be utilized internal to an active object to allow data race-free parallel message processing and data race-free structured parallel computations. This overcomes the coarse-grained nature of active object parallelism without compromising safety.
Programming in an object-oriented language demands a fine balance between flexibility and control. At one level, objects need to interact freely to achieve our implementation goals. At a higher level, architectural constraints that ensure the system can be understood by new developers and can evolve as requirements change must be met. To resolve this tension, researchers have developed type systems expressing ownership and behavioural restrictions such as immutability. This work reports on our consolidation of the resulting discoveries into a single programming language. Our language, Joe 3 , imposes little additional syntactic overhead, yet can encode powerful patterns such as fractional permissions and the reference modes of Flexible Alias Protection.
Active objects offer a structured approach to concurrency, encapsulating both unshared state and a thread of control. For efficient data transfer, data should be passed by reference whenever possible, but this introduces aliasing and undermines the validity of the active objects. This paper proposes a minimal variant of ownership types that preserves the required race freedom invariant yet enables data transfer by reference between active objects (that is, without copying) in many cases, and a cheap clone operation where copying is necessary. Our approach is general and should be adaptable to several existing active object systems.
Ownership type systems give a strong notion of separation between aggregates. Objects belonging to different owners cannot be aliased, and thus a mutating operation internal to one object is guaranteed to be invisible to another. This naturally facilitates reasoning about correctness on a local scale, but also proves beneficial for coarse-grained parallelism as noninterference between statements touching different objects is easily established. For fine-grained parallelism, ownership types fall short as owner-based disjointness only allows separation of the innards of different aggregates, which is very coarse-grained. Concretely: ownership types can reason about the disjointness of two different data structures, but cannot reason about the internal structure or disjointness within the data structure, without resorting to static and overly constraining measures. For similar reasons, ownership fails to determine internal disjointness of external pointers to objects that share a common owner. In this paper, we introduce the novel notion of refined ownership which overcomes these limitations by allowing precise local reasoning about a group of objects even though they belong to the same external owner. Using refined ownership, we can statically check determinism of parallel operations on tree-shaped substructures of a data structure, including operations on values external to the structure, without imposing any non-local alias restrictions.


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Media failed to identify conservative think tank that laundered DeLay travel money
Written by Gabe Wildau
News reports on recent revelations that gambling interests funded a lavish, expense-paid trip to Britain by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) and his wife by funneling the money through a tax-exempt organization, the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), have consistently failed to note that NCPPR is a conservative think tank.
- In a March 16 article, The Washington Post referred to "a nonprofit group -- the National Center for Public Policy Research -- that covered the same amount as the cost of DeLay's London trip."
- On March 17, the Post referred to "a second tax-exempt charity, the National Center for Public Policy Research."
- In its March 21 issue, Time magazine reported: "Three G.O.P. House members enjoyed trips to Britain that included a round of golf at St. Andrews in Scotland; all claimed the visits were work related and funded by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a think tank."
- The Chicago Tribune reported on "the National Center for Public Policy Research, a public policy group that largely covered the cost of a trip DeLay took in 2000 to Britain." Knight Ridder / Tribune Information Services syndicated the story to its papers around the country.
- The Associated Press reported on March 16: "DeLay reported in House financial disclosures that the weeklong May 2000 trip was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research, a nonprofit organization."
In fact, NCPPR makes no secret of its political ideology. In addition to proclaiming that it is "A Conservative Think Tank" in the header of its website's home page, NCPPR explains its mission this way: "In 1982, we started The National Center to provide the conservative movement with a versatile and energetic organization capable of responding quickly and decisively to fast-breaking issues." The watchdog group Media Transparency reports that NCPPR has received funding from prominent conservative foundations, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; the Randolph Foundation; the Roe Foundation; and two foundations controlled by notorious right-wing Clinton-hater Richard Mellon Scaife: the Sarah Scaife Foundation and the Carthage Foundation.
NCPPR's president and chairman, Amy Ridenour, is a former deputy director of the College Republican National Committee and former regional coordinator for Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign.
In 2003, Ridenour authored a quasi-denial that global warming caused by human activity is a real phenomenon:
The theory that human activity is causing the planet to warm significantly is just that, a theory, and one that, so far, hasn't been coming true. Any serious discussion about global warming -- whether in Senate debate, hearing testimony, speeches, prepared remarks or press releases -- should include an acknowledgement that the best available scientific models of our atmosphere are not yet sophisticated enough to accurately predict either future temperatures or humankind's impact upon climate.
NCPPR publishes reports, policy papers, and talking points on a variety of issues, including environmental and regulatory policy, national defense, health care, Social Security, and legal reform.
NCPPR is supporting President Bush's plan to partially privatize Social Security by echoing Bush's crisis rhetoric on the issue. One page of talking points misleadingly claims that Social Security faces a $26 trillion shortfall between now and 2077. In fact, the Social Security trustees estimate the true 75-year shortfall at $3.7 trillion. NCPPR's estimate relies on a misleading Heritage Foundation analysis that uses a "constant dollar" estimate of the shortfall, a bogus measurement that responsible analysts reject.
NCPPR runs a website, EnviroTruth.org, that is "dedicated to injecting badly needed truth into the debate about our environment." The site purports to debunk "myths and misunderstandings" about global warming, referred to as "climate change," and to counter claims that chemicals such as perchlorate (used in rocket propellants) and MTBE (a gasoline additive) pose a danger to public health when they seep into drinking water supplies.
NCPPR has also been a leading advocate for tort "reform." Its publications on the subject rail against "frivolous lawsuits," "lawsuit abuse," and "predatory attorneys."
On health care, NCPPR favors privatizing Medicare through "multiple private insurance program choices for seniors within Medicare."
On civil rights, one commentator for NCPPR, Mike Green, claimed that "the political party that failed to defeat the Civil Rights Act," i.e., the Democratic party, has supported anti-poverty measures that are destroying black families. He urged blacks to support "white conservatives, who actually seek to uphold moral virtues":
In 1964, when Southern Democrats lost their fight against the Civil Rights Act, blacks progressed at a phenomenal rate. Albeit poor, we were moving in the right direction. We believed in God, family and freedom. Families were mostly intact. Out-of-wedlock births were below 25 percent, and that was considered high.
In 1965, liberals began introducing hundreds of government programs creating a massive welfare state now in dire need of reform. The dirty secret is that, under the guise of government assistance, those wishing to suck from the federal cash nipple must remove the male provider from a household or find their cash cut off. As a result, black illegitimacy skyrocketed.
Should black America assume some responsibility for this mess? You bet. But is it by mistake or design that government programs to help financially-strapped families can be accessed only if the nucleus of the family is destroyed in the process? Is it by mistake or design that the political party that failed to defeat the Civil Rights Act is tossing cash in the face of poor black women only if they divorce their men and marry the government?
Ever since Republicans first passed civil rights legislation in 1866, opponents of more rights and freedoms and equal status for blacks have lost every battle. They have, however, convinced blacks that conservatives seek to oppress us. That's another lie. The attention we give to hating white conservatives, who actually seek to uphold moral virtues and fight for our independence from government, keeps us from paying attention to our own problems.
Green is a member of NCPPR's Project 21, described as a "national leadership network of black conservatives." Among the members of Project 21's national advisory board is Mychal Massie, who wrote a December 2004 column for the conservative news website WorldNetDaily.com that likened Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to segregationists T. Eugene "Bull" Connor and Orval Faubus for his criticism of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Massie also claimed Reid was "simply being true to his inbred familial heritage" as a Mormon, then cited racist statements by past Mormon leaders.


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Top 10 Wizarding World Mysteries That Were Never Fully Explained
Ten Actually False "Facts" from American History
Top 10 Generational Curses Millenials Are Breaking
10 Stories from Gnostic Mythology
10 Terrifying Native American Legends
10 Insane War Stories That Turned Out to Be Myths
10 Behind the Scenes Facts about Iconic Kisses in Movies
10 Curious Facts about the Winchester Royal Bone Chests
10 Crimes Committed on Video Games Meant for Kids
10 Facts You Might Not Know about the Nazi's Atomic Bomb Program
Top 10 Wizarding World Mysteries That Were Never Fully Explained
Ten Actually False "Facts" from American History
Who's Behind Listverse?
Jamie Frater
Head Editor
Jamie founded Listverse due to an insatiable desire to share fascinating, obscure, and bizarre facts. He has been a guest speaker on numerous national radio and television stations and is a five time published author.
More About UsTop 10 Generational Curses Millenials Are Breaking
10 Stories from Gnostic Mythology
10 Terrifying Native American Legends
10 Insane War Stories That Turned Out to Be Myths
10 Behind the Scenes Facts about Iconic Kisses in Movies
10 Curious Facts about the Winchester Royal Bone Chests
10 Crimes Committed on Video Games Meant for Kids
10 Enormous Numbers
One of the first questions that kids often ask is "What is the biggest number?" This question is an important step in transitioning to a world of abstract concepts. The answer is of course that numbers are generally considered endless, but there gets to be a point were numbers become so big that there really is no point in having them, they have no real importance outside of the fact that yes technically they do exist. To make a list like this I could simply write down a massive number for the first number, and then write +1, +2, +3 and so on for the rest of the list. Instead I chose to take out 10 numbers that do have some effect on the world and place them in ascending order, giving a brief explanation as to what they are and how they have some relevance on the world, albeit very small relevance, especially when compared to the size of the number itself.
Ten to the eightieth power – a 1 with 80 zeros after it – is quite massive but somewhat tangible at least from a relatively concrete point of view. This is the estimated number of fundamental particles in the known universe, and with fundamental particles we're not talking about microscopic particles, we're talking about much smaller things like Quarks and Leptons – subatomic particles. The name for this number in U.S. and Modern British is "One Hundred Quinquavigintillion" I would write out phonetically how to pronounce that but I don't have a clue. The concept of the amount of such small things and how many of them make up the entire universe may seem overwhelming, but it is the smallest and easiest to understand of the numbers on this list.
The word googol, with a slightly different spelling, has become a frequently used verb in modern times, thanks to a highly popular search engine. The number has an interesting history which you can find by simply googling it. The term was coined by Milton Sirotta in 1938 when he was 9 years old. Although this is a relatively abstract number, only existing for the fact that it technically exists, but it does come up occasionally in other uses.
Mental Calculator Alexis Lemaire set a world record for calculating the 13th root of a 100 digit number, the 13th root of 8,192 is 2, or 2 times itself thirteen times, 100 digit numbers are googols, one of the numbers that Lemaire had calculated would have read (3 googol, 893 Duotrigintillion, ext, ext.) Another use is from about 1 to 1.5 googol years after the big bang, the most massive black holes will have exploded. These will be the last recognizable structure of our universe to disintegrate, and once it does the universe will enter its 5th and final era – known as the Dark Era – the end of the universe based on certain scientific models.
A Plank length is extremely small, approximately 1.616199 x 10-35 meters, or in long form 0.00000000000000000000000000000616199 meters. There are about a googol of them in a 1 inch cube. Plank length and Plank volumes are important in quantum physics branches like string theory – evidently sizes this small allow the extra dimensions to be detected, at least in some theories. How do all these small things apply to the third smallest number of this list? There are approximately 8.5 x 10^185 plank volumes in the universe. This number is both massive and its practical purpose relatively non-existent, however it is still simple compared to the rest of the numbers on this list.
The third largest number on this list, the number of all the plank volumes in the universe, consists of 185 digits. This number here consists of almost 13 million digits. The significance of this number is that it is currently the largest known prime number. It was discovered in August of 2008 by the Great Internet Messene Prime Search (GIMPS). From here on the numbers become much more difficult to render.
A lot of people have heard this word as well, fans of the Back to the Future movies may remember Dr. Emit L. Brown muttering the line "she's one in a million, one in a billion, one in a googolplex." But what is a googolplex? Remember how long a googol is? A one with a hundred zeros after it, a googolplex is a 1 with a googol zeros after it. How big is this number? If the entire universe was filled with paper and all that those papers had written on them were zeros at a size 10 font, it would only be about half the zeros required to write out this number in the long form. Even writing the number in scientific notation is not very practical, for a number this large it requires yet another type of notation, something called a power tower. For example our first number 10^80 is the first part of a power tower, as the power tower grows the next number would be placed as a superscript above and to the right of the 80. These are not always possible to write in digital text, so we have to use yet another short hand, the same method used on a graphing calculator, the symbol "^". So item 10 on this list can be rendered as so 10^80, or ten to the eightieth. Now with this form of notation we can more easily write out the googolplex, which is 10^10^100, or ten to the tenth to the one hundredth. We will also be using these towers for the next few numbers so I hope you're okay with conceptualizing them.
Skewe's Number is the upper bounds to the math problem that: π(x) > Li(x), a simple looking enough equation, however Li is a much more complicated equation in it's own right. Essentially Skewe's number proves that a number "x" exists that violates this rule, assuming that Reimanns hypothesis is true then that number "x" is less than 10^10^10^36, (most numbers are) the first of Skewe's Numbers, much bigger than a googolplex, noted because of the extra tower. There is also an even large Skewe number, without assuming Reimanns hypothesis, x is less then 10^10^10^963.
This is very complicated stuff, but the core concept is relatively simple: "given enough time, anything is possible" Poincare recurrence time is the amount of time that it would take for the entire universe to return to a state that is relatively the same as to what it is today, caused by random quantum fluctuations, or in more simplified terms, "History will repeat itself." The high estimate of how long this will take is 10^10^10^10^10^1.1 years.
This number is massive – in the 1980s it was listed in the Guinness book of world records as the most massive finite number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. It was created Ron Graham, as the upper bounds to a problem in Ramsey Theory involving multicolored hyper cubes. The number is so big even a power tower would be too cumbersome to represent the number. The only way to easily represent the number is to use Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation and it's own equation. Let's go through this piece by piece.
First Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation is a method of writing very large numbers, it would be much too complicated to explain exactly how the arrows work here, but you can visualize it this way. 3↑3 translates to 33 or 27, 3↑↑3 translates to 3^3^3 or 7,625,597,484,987. Now if you were to add another arrow to the number 3↑↑↑3, then the power tower would be over 7.5 trillion levels. This alone is much much bigger than the Poincare Recurrence time, and you can add an infinite amount of arrows and each arrow makes the number that much more powerful.
The representation of Graham's number is: G=f64(4), where f(n)=3↑^n3. The best way to look at this is in layers. The first layer is 3↑↑↑↑3, which is already a number too massive to represent in most other forms. The next layer has that many arrows between 3s. Then take that answer and put that many arrows into the next layer between 3s, and this goes on for 64 layers. If you're interested the last ten digits of Grahams Number are 2464195387, no one, not even Graham himself knows what the first digit is.
Most people know of this number and it is used in hyperbole all the time – kind of like the number one zillion – but it's more complicated then most people realize, and if you thought the numbers that came before this one were strange, this one is even stranger, and a controversial number too. According to the rules of infinity, there are an infinite number of odd numbers and even numbers in infinity even though there can only be half as many odd numbers as total numbers. Infinity plus one equals infinity, infinity minus one equals infinity, infinity plus infinity equals infinity, infinity divided in half is still infinity, but infinity minus infinity is not exactly understood, infinity divided by infinity would probably be 1.
Scientists estimate 1080 subatomic particles in our known universe, but that is the known universe, or the observable universe. A lot of scientists, however, believe that the universe is infinite, or if they don't believe this is the case they still accept it as a possibility. If this is the case then by mathematics alone there must be another Earth out there where every atom happens to be in the exact same location in relation to every other atom on Earth as it is in our own. The chances of two carbon copy Earths are extremely small, however in an infinite universe it not only can occur but it has to occur, and not only that, there has to be an infinite amount of carbon copy Earths out there if the universe does in fact go one forever.
Not all people believe in infinity however, Israeli Mathematics Professor Doron Zeilberger, stated that he feels numbers do not go on forever and there is a number so large that when you add 1 to it you will go back to zero, however this number is much higher then anything humans can comprehend, and that number may never be found or proven, this belief is the main pillar in a mathematical philosophy known as Ultrafinitism.
Sorry, had to do it.


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- Home
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- Travel Information
Travel Information
Prohibited Items
The Transportation Security Administration lists items that are prohibited in checked and carry-on baggage.
- Sharp Objects
- Sporting Goods
- Guns and Firearms
- Tools
- Martial Arts and Self Defense Items
- Hazardous Material, Explosive and Flammable Materials, Disabling Chemicals, and Other Dangerous Items
To learn more about permitted and prohibited items, please visit the TSA Website.
Rules About Liquids
- TSA and our security partners conducted extensive explosives testing since August 10, 2006, and determined that liquids, aerosols and gels, in limited quantities, are safe to bring aboard an aircraft. The one bag limit per traveler limits the total amount each traveler can bring. Consolidating the bottles into one bag and X-raying them separately from the carry-on bag enables security officers to quickly clear the items.
- 3-1-1 for carry-ons = 3.4 ounce (100ml) bottle or less (by volume); 1 quart-sized, clear, plastic, zip-top bag; 1 bag per passenger placed in screening bin. One-quart bag per person limits the total liquid volume each traveler can bring. 3.4 ounce (100ml) container size is a security measure.
- Be prepared. Each time TSA searches a carry-on it slows down the line. Practicing 3-1-1 will ensure a faster and easier checkpoint experience.
- 3-1-1 is for short trips. If in doubt, put your liquids in checked luggage.
- Declare larger liquids. Medications, baby formula and food, and breast milk are allowed in reasonable quantities exceeding three ounces and are not required to be in the zip-top bag. Declare these items for inspection at the checkpoint. Officers may need to open these items to conduct additional screening.
Travel Tips
- The terminal is open one and one-half hours before the morning flight, and it is suggested that travelers arrive at least one hour prior to their scheduled flight time.
- When booking your flight, remember to book early - that is when you will find the least expensive flights.
Before You Get to the Airport
- Don't wrap presents! Security personnel will unwrap for inspection.
- Don't over-pack. Take only what you absolutely need. An overstuffed bag can slow down security screening because it's generally hard to re-close. Consider spreading items in between several bags.
- Carry-on bags: think small. Carry-on items are limited to one bag and one personal item, such as a purse, briefcase or laptop. The bag can be no bigger than 9 inches by 14inches by 22 inches or a total of 45 linear inches.
- Make sure all your bags of ID tags on them.
- Be sure your bags have identification tags on both the outside and inside.
- Put all undeveloped film in your carry-on bag because checked baggage screening equipment will damage film. If your film is over ASA/ISO 800, or has been sent through an X-ray machine five times, request a hand inspection.
- All passengers who are 18 years of age and older must present a government issued photo ID. Make sure the name on your ticket matches the name on your photo ID.
When You Get to the Airport
- As you approach the security checkpoint, take your laptop and video cameras with cassettes out of their cases.
- Remove your outer coat, suit coat, jacket or blazer to place in bin for X-ray.
- Place the following items in your carry-on baggage before entering the screening checkpoint: cell phones and personal data assistants, keys, loose change, jewelry and large metal items.
Additional traveler tips and information.


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Retirement Savings Credit Doubles Payoff
Contributors to retirement plans already know the long-term tax advantages of an individual retirement account or 401(k). Taxes are deferred, and in some cases never collected, on money put away for the golden years.
Now a tax credit will let some savers reap the rewards of their retirement thrift early.
The retirement savings contributions credit, also called the saver's credit, appears on Form 1040 and Form 1040A tax returns as a way to reward lower-wage earners who sock away retirement money.
Because the tax break is a credit instead of a deduction, it's a better deal. Tax deductions reduce taxable income, but credits come into play after you calculate how much tax you owe, and they reduce your Internal Revenue Service bill dollar for dollar. For example, if you owe $500 and you are eligible for a $250 credit, the check you have to write to Uncle Sam is cut in half.
Income limits
A filer eligible for the saver's credit could shave as much as $1,000 off his or her tax bill. The actual credit amount depends on your income, filing status and just how much you put into retirement plans.
Basically, the lower your income, the bigger your credit. The income limits that determine how large a credit you can claim are adjusted annually to keep pace with inflation. The precise credit percentages for 2011 filings are found in the table below.
Retirement savings credit guidelines; earnings are adjusted gross income
As the table shows, the maximum available credit is 50% of contributions for filers in the lower end of the earnings ranges. There is, however, a limit on the retirement plan contribution amount you can use to figure the tax break.
Although tax law allowed you to put up to $5,000 in 2011 ($6,000 if you're age 50 or older) in your IRA, only $2,000 of that will count in figuring the saver's credit. That makes it worth at most $1,000 for single taxpayers. Of course, if you're married and you and your spouse put away at least two grand toward retirement, your joint return would reflect a $2,000 credit.
Which contributions count?
Contributions to traditional and Roth IRAs as well as to employer-sponsored 401(k) plans count toward computing the credit. So does money you put into a Savings Incentive Match Plan for Employees, or SIMPLE, plan; a 403(b) program; a governmental 457 plan; or a salary reduction Simplified Employee Pension, or SEP. You can only count the money you put in your workplace account, not any matching amounts your company contributed.
The credit is based on your total contributions to all your eligible retirement accounts, not for contributions to each. So if you put $2,000 into a Roth and another $2,000 into your 401(k) at work, you still can only calculate your credit on the allowable maximum of $2,000.
Enter all your retirement saving amounts on Form 8880, Credit for Qualified Retirement Savings Contributions, and complete the form to arrive at your exact credit rate and amount. Once you get the dollar amount, transfer it to line 50 of your 1040 or line 32 if you file the 1040A. The credit isn't available for 1040EZ filers, so you might want to consider changing your choice of returns if you've been putting away retirement cash.
If your IRA contribution is to a traditional account, you may be able to get a double tax break. In addition to the saver's credit, look into whether you're eligible to deduct your IRA contributions on the front page of your 1040 or 1040A. This tax break is one of several adjustments to income that are available to all taxpayers, regardless of whether they are??itemizing or taking the standard deduction, and the IRS says you can claim the retirement savings credit and deduction for your IRA contributions.
The credit also is attractive to workers who are eligible to participate in a 401(k) plan but who earn just over one of the saver's credit income limits. By signing up for a company-sponsored account, such workers could get under the earnings cap while simultaneously boosting the potential credit amount.
Take, for example, a married employee who is the sole earner in her family and who reports adjusted gross income of $35,000 on her joint tax return. She's already eligible for a partial credit, but if she contributes $2,000 to her 401(k), she will knock her income down enough to take the maximum credit.
Some other restrictions apply
In addition to the income limits, there are a few other restrictions on who can claim the saver's credit. A taxpayer who was younger than 18 last year, a full-time student or claimed as a dependent on another's tax return can't take the retirement savings break.
The saver's credit is also what the IRS calls nonrefundable. That means you can use it to reduce your tax bill to zero, but you can't take advantage of any excess credit amount to get a refund. So if you owe no taxes, the credit is of no use to you.
Still, even if you can't take full advantage of the credit, it's not too shabby of a break when you take into account the additional tax savings you get by contributing to a retirement account in the first place.
Just remember, the key to this credit is participation in retirement accounts. If you haven't opened a retirement account yet, or have one but haven't contributed for the 2011 tax year, you have until the April tax-filing deadline to open one and put in money. The deadline is the same for either a Roth or traditional IRA.
As for your 401(k), you're locked into your credit for the 2011 tax year based on the contributions you made last year. Make sure the W-2 you got from your company reflects the correct amount of all your pension contributions so that you can get the maximum credit.
If you're not yet participating in your company plan, you can improve your future saver's credit potential by signing up as soon as you're eligible. Then contribute as much as you can afford without doing major cash-flow damage to your paycheck. It could pay off at tax-filing time as well as when you retire.
Copyright 2012, Bankrate Inc.


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Green Party Co-leader Metiria Turei
Mr Speaker,
To quote Bill English – "Is that it? Six weeks over summer to think about new policy, and the Government has comes up with precisely nothing."
There is nothing in today's speech that offers tangible solutions to the big issues facing everyday New Zealanders. Worse, the direction set out by this Government does not reflect the intrinsic character of New Zealand or the underlying values of New Zealanders. Their hands-off economic conservatism benefits their wealthy backers and runs counter to our country's proud history of economic egalitarianism and fairness.
Their cold hearted social policies run roughshod over our decades-old social contract, of supporting people when they need help and our loving commitment to be our brothers' and sisters' keepers. And their short sighted view of our beautiful environment, our rivers and beaches, forests and National Parks, as nothing more than irritating impediments to their exploitative economic agenda, is like stabbing a knife into the heart of our national identity. It's not who we are. And it's not who we want to be.
It's not who we are
New Zealanders have a strong and proud national identity. At our best we are a unique mix of environmental guardians, social reformers and economic innovators. New Zealanders also have a proud tradition of leading and forging an independent path. We weren't the second country to give women the vote – we were the first. Hillary wasn't the second person to climb Mount Everest – he was the first. We said no to nuclear even though it damaged our relationship with the greatest superpower on earth, because it was the right thing to do.
We are gritty fighters who regularly punch above our weight. We are constantly striving for a better future that is economically, socially and environmentally richer. But John Key and his Government do not reflect who we are. Instead of making us richer in the things that matter, they make us poorer. Because on every important measure this Government is failing. And in their failure they undermine our heritage, our identity and our potential.
Economic failure
So let's look at that failure further, and what better place to start than the economy.
New Zealanders are finally waking up to what Americans learnt four years ago. If you want to destroy an economy, hand it over to an investment banker to run it. All of John Key's Wall Street insider knowledge has been used to dazzling disaster on the New Zealand economy. The Merrill Lynch playbook of destroying good, everyday jobs, fuelling an unaffordable housing crisis, and damaging our long term viability, just so the rich can get richer quickly has been expertly implemented here.
The fallacy that National Governments are good managers of the economy has proven to be wrong again. The facts speak for themselves. When the National Government took office, the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent. It is now 7.3 percent. There has been a net reduction of over 40,000 jobs in the manufacturing sector alone. When National took office, Government debt was $40 billion. It is now $82 billion.
When National took office, the national savings rate was a modest 2.1 percent. It is now 0.7 percent. While John Key continues to blame the global financial crisis for his Government's poor economic performance, most other OECD countries have been getting on and managing it.
IMF data shows that the New Zealand economy has performed worse than the majority of countries in the OECD since 2009. The data shows New Zealand scored 18th out of the 34 OECD countries for GDP growth, 22nd for unemployment, 30th for the current account deficit, 28th for national savings growth, and 23rd for government debt. By nearly all measures of traditional economic success – growth, employment, the current account deficit, national savings, and government debt – New Zealand has performed poorly when compared to the rest of the OECD.
This is a bleak picture. Economic measure after economic measure tell a story of missed opportunities, that left unresolved will leave generations of Kiwis permanently worse off. It's not who we are. New Zealanders are proud economic innovators. We have transformed our economy many times over to respond to the world around us and seize the opportunities of the future.
The best opportunities for the New Zealand economy lie in transitioning to a truly green economy, yet there was not a single mention of these opportunities in the Prime Ministers speech today. The Pure Advantage group's report, released last year, tells us we have natural global advantages in geothermal energy. But the Government wants to hock off our best launchpad into that lucrative energy market by selling Mighty River Power.
We need to stop the Government's ideologically blinkered asset sales so all New Zealanders can benefit from the huge geothermal opportunities Mighty River Power has before it. But today's speech attempts once more to make the unwinnable case for asset sales. The Prime Minister is still trying to convince New Zealanders that asset sales are a good deal for the country. We know that selling our power companies doesn't add up – that's why over 360,000 New Zealanders have signed the petition calling for a referendum to stop the sales.
The report the Green party commissioned from BERL proved categorically that asset sales would cost the government more than they bring in. Even Treasury's projections now confirm that the sale process alone would cost hundreds of millions. The costs of selling our assets would go on forever. The sales would leave a $100m a year hole in the government's books, long after the revenue is gone.
Environmental failure
The Government's failures don't stop there – they are undermining a key part of who we are as a country when they undermine and devalue the environment of our beautiful country.
We all remember being able to swim in rivers when we were growing up but now we can't because a lot of them are full of, um, effluent. The Government seems to have a pathological opposition to any measure that seeks to protect our beautiful country and make our claims to 100% Pure a reality. Bringing in Nick Smith for a spot of Greenwash window dressing won't change that. The so far under told story of this Government is their failure as environmental guardians.
Their approach to the environment runs counter to our history and who we are. The Government's environmental policies do not share the values of everyday Kiwis who want to love and protect our amazing country. Again when we look at the environment, the facts speak for themselves. New Zealand has plummeted from the top spot overall to 14th in the most recent Yale Environmental Index.
Our Maui's dolphins are on the brink of extinction. In 2005 it was estimated that the population of Maui's dolphins was 111. Now it is estimated there are only 55 adult Maui's dolphins remaining. And yet the Government still hasn't implemented the interim measures to protect Maui's dolphins that DOC proposed in March of last year.
What would it say about us if we allowed the Maui's dolphin to become extinct? How will we explain to our grandchildren we were more prepared to stand up for the interests of commercial fishing than a tiny dolphin that was relying on us for its very existence? What would the Maui's dolphin's extinction say about National's actual commitment to the environment?
And let's not forget about climate change. Our agricultural nation relies on a stable climate for prosperity, and yet this Government has pulled out of Kyoto and gutted the ETS. And while our gross emissions continue to increase under this Government and we do a disservice to our local economy, what does it say about our commitment to our Pacific brothers and sisters?
What does our withdrawal from tackling climate change internationally say to our nearest neighbours whose islands are going under water? We are a Pacific nation with a significant Pacifika population here, but we don't care enough to do the heavy lifting on climate change to tackle this serious issue playing out in our own backyard, to our own family.
That's just not who we are.
Social failure
I wouldn't want to be a child growing up in New Zealand today. The support that my daughter and I received, that helped me to get to where I am today, has been stripped away by this Government.
This Government's social policies have been a disaster for New Zealand families, especially children. On official measures, income inequality in New Zealand is now the highest it has ever been. Low and middle income earners are feeling the squeeze while the best-off continue to increase the share of wealth in their control.
At the same time, more of our kids are now living in poverty, from 22 percent prior to the election in 2008 to 25 percent at the end of this Government's first term. National crows about its rheumatic fever program but allows more and more kids to suffer from it because they ignore the housing crisis. Everyone deserves a secure roof over their heads. But our rates of home ownership have plummeted with less than two-thirds of homes now owned by the families living in them. The recent Demographia report, showing that New Zealand has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world, was met with more inaction by this failed Government.
So much for all of us being in this together. For many New Zealanders the ability to lead a good life is cut off at the knees by the lack of opportunity and support at an early age. The Government's mean spirited approach to poverty and hardship does not reflect the values that have shaped our more egalitarian past. We can be a more caring country again, one that protects our most vulnerable citizens and offers an equality of opportunity for all.
No new ideas
The Government has lost touch of who we are as a country and have no new ideas to get us out of the hole they have dug.
The desperate cabinet reshuffle embeds that failure; it rings only a change of personnel, not policy. And the Prime Minister's plan, set out in a speech last Friday and again today, offers more of the same blame and excuses. A boring plan by a bored man.
It's the Government's worst ideas of 2012 repeated, it's Groundhog Day. Adverse asset sales that will make the Government's books permanently worse off, and lose the clean energy potential of these companies.
A shonky SkyCity convention centre funded by the proceeds of gambling addiction, human misery and money laundering.
Dangerous deep sea drilling that puts our beautiful beaches at risk of a Gulf of Mexico scale oil spill.
Today's speech from the Prime Minister is most telling for what it doesn't mention. The plans the Government is not making.
Not a word on the crisis in manufacturing and the 40,000 jobs lost under their watch.
Not a single word on climate change. Not mentioned once.
Just a sentence on child poverty, and only a vague reference to looking at other peoples work and recommendations.
Not an utterance on the Auckland CBD rail loop and the Government's plans for support of it.
Where are the plans to tackle youth unemployment, the exodus of New Zealanders to Australia, restocking the empty earthquake fund or rebuilding our billion dollar 100% Pure brand after recent criticisms of it?
All the Government is good for is name calling, untruthful slander and school yard jibes that seek to ridicule real work the opposition is undertaking to address big issues like unemployment and housing affordability.
You know a Government is tired when all it can do is attack good ideas that are popular with the public.
John Key has been relegated to the Prime Minister for making excuses. Deep down he knows they've failed and under National the future is blighted rather than brighter.
The Government's long holiday from running the country needs to end. If they won't act we all need to step up instead if we want a better future.
Green priorities for 2013
Unfortunately 2013 isn't an election year. But New Zealanders can't wait until the next election to stop the dangerous direction the Government is taking.
This year the Greens will step up the fight for decent jobs, elimination of child poverty, and our defence of our environment.
We will do this through generating fresh thinking and new ideas, and through building a movement of people to stop the worst of the Government's agenda.
At Ratana last week, I announced our plans to help families achieve the kiwi dream of owning their own home, or being more secure in a rental home.
This initiative will have lasting impacts. It will give young families a real shot at owning their own home. It is also great for our environment as we build more sustainable, compact homes, and on child health and family well-being. It will also create thousands of jobs.
The Green Party will continue to develop smart solutions to our modern problems. We will offer New Zealanders real alternatives to this tired, bored and unimaginative Government.
But as well as new ideas, we will also offer New Zealanders the opportunity to take action.
The Green Party has launched an initiative to draw together new constituencies of New Zealanders disillusioned with the direction the Government is taking.
We are committed to giving New Zealanders a political voice and the opportunity to be involved in politics outside of elections and without having to join a party. We think this is essential for our democracy.
Opposing a tired old Government, developing new ideas and giving Kiwis the chance to get active in politics. Those are our priorities for this year.
It is clear that the Key Government is resorting to the politics of fear and hate to try and hold onto power, but it won't work because that's not who New Zealanders are.
The Government may have given up on making our country a better place but the people haven't.
Andrew Campbell | Communications Director
Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand
14:05 Bowen House, Parliament Buildings
04 817 6793 | 021 243 8573 | [email protected]
Authorised by Metiria Turei and Russel Norman, Parliament Buildings, Wellington


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Over a three day session at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, 25 Wikimedians and cultural professionals worked within yards of America's most precious documents to galvanize the US GLAM-Wiki community around new tools and resources.
GLAMcamp DC was the third in a series of GLAMcamps designed to focus outreach efforts, documentation, and tools to connect cultural organizations (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) with the Wikimedia movement.
While previous GLAMcamps brought together Wikimedians from around the world, GLAMcamp DC specifically focused on coordination within the US. This event served to kick start the GLAM-Wiki US community, which will be supported through my position as US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator this year.
Over the past two years, more and more cultural organizations have expressed interest in establishing Wikimedia partnerships. However, in the US we have lacked the organizational capacity to fully support these projects. With this in mind, GLAMcamp DC was focused on achieving outcomes that would make it far easier for cultural professionals to connect and engage with Wikimedians. The event was organized as a combination of facilitated breakout sessions, orientation presentations (such as GLAM Outreach Basics), and task-focused groups on everything from technical tool development and documentation creation to Wiki Loves Monuments coordination. I was so impressed with how quickly the participants came together to learn from each other and work together to achieve our shared goals.
Outcomes of the weekend included:
- Bulk Upload Documentation: The Walters Art Museum has stepped up as the first cultural organization to directly work with Wikimedians to develop a documented process for uploading images to Commons. What has been called the "bulk upload tool" has been re-envisioned as a set of easy to understand tools and best practices that can be replicated by cultural organizations. The Walters' collection is being used as a case study for this process, which will continue to be developed over the coming months.
- Wikipedia Citation Tool: A second significant technical development was the creation of a Wikipedia citation engine for MARC library records. Inspired by Trove, this web browser extension will allow users to obtain a citation for the use on a specific language version of Wikipedia from any online library catalog, rather than depending on the database to provide this option to users.
- GLAM US Portal: A team worked to improve the layout and flow of the new GLAM US portal, which will serve as the hub for connecting cultural organizations with Wikimedia volunteers based on location or project type. Emphasis was placed on making the landing page easily digestible for GLAM decision makers, with links to more details for Wikimedia volunteers and cultural professionals looking for deeper resources and case studies.
- GLAM Connect: Ideas were further developed for the GLAM Connect page, which will serve as the space for Wikimedian volunteer sign-up and for cultural professionals to seek out individuals to assist with both online and on-location projects. A state-based system for localized contacts and resources is being piloted, as well as a master list of professional organization contacts. Additionally, the GLAM-Wiki US Facebook page was created in an effort to better share information with specific audiences.
- GLAM Bookshelf: Cultural professionals in attendance assisted with listing documentation needs and reviewing existing resources, while Wikimedians with experience in GLAM projects worked to create and upload high-need documentation. The GLAM Bookshelf will serve as a space to compile these handouts, powerpoints, videos, and on-wiki guides that can assist Wikimedians and cultural professionals with GLAM partnerships.
- GLAM-Wiki One-Pager: In preparation for upcoming presentations at GLAM conferences, a group worked to complete a two-sided handout directed at GLAM professionals. The one-pager provides an overview of GLAM-Wiki information, including case stories on current partnerships, pull quotes from GLAM professionals, and contact information. A side effect of this one-pager was the creation of a GLAM style guide, which will serve to establish clear terminology and branding of GLAM concepts such as "Wikipedian in Residence" and "Backstage Pass."
We achieved these outcomes only through the inspiring collaborative efforts of the dedicated participants. In organizing this event we aimed to bring together a very specific group that included museum, library, and archives professionals, outreach-focused GLAM-Wiki volunteers, tech-focused GLAM-Wiki volunteers, and Wikimedians from broad backgrounds who were interested in becoming more involved in GLAM.
When they weren't hard at work, participants had the opportunity to enjoy tours at the National Archives and the Smithsonian's American Art Museum and Lunder Conservation Center. The tour of the National Archives took Wikimedians through the rotunda housing the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, to the head archivists' offices in "Mahogany Row," to the highly-secured stacks where unfathomable amounts of documentation are housed. In addition to these tours, participants attended a GLAM-Wiki meet up, sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation and Creative Commons, which brought together local cultural professionals and interested students to learn more about GLAM-Wiki.
The projects and networking that came out of GLAMcamp DC have contributed greatly to addressing the needs of US GLAM-Wiki collaborations, but this is only the beginning. Over the coming months, we're looking to further refine this new collaborative framework and to significantly expand the list of volunteers interested in US partnerships.
Ultimately, in addition to these impressive outcomes, the most important result of GLAMcamp DC was the renewed solidarity and energy of US GLAM-Wiki volunteers, who are now looking to better connect cultural institutions in every state with the resources of GLAM-Wiki US and the broader GLAM-Wiki community.
Lori Byrd Phillips
US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
GLAMcamp DC was funded by a grant from the Wikimedia Grants program, with event sponsorship from Creative Commons. GLAMcamp DC was co-organized by Lori Phillips, Sarah Stierch, and Pete Forsyth.
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Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG)
By buying local, we not only provide our families with high-quality and affordable goods from producers that we know and trust, but we also keep agriculture as a viable industry, thereby preserving farmland and maintaining our rural heritage.
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Access bids and RFPs for consultants, service providers, contractors, vendors, and suppliers.
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At the Harford County Chamber of Commerce, our business is your success. We are the premier business advocate in the county, helping members connect and thrive to create a vibrant economy across all sectors.
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Through innovative programs such as Harford's Business Edge, the GroundFloor at Harford, and the Harford Business Innovation Center, Harford County has poised itself as a progressive community where technology and the entrepreneurial spirit can grow and thrive.
Health Department
Harford County's Health Department is the local operating arm of the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) in Harford County, and is responsible for the delivery of a wide range of preventive health care, clinical services, and environmental health services to citizens living in Harford County.
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The Department of Inspections, Licenses, and Permits is responsible for the administration and enforcement of all laws and regulations pertaining to licenses, including those relating to building and construction, plumbing, mechanical, electrical installations, mobile homes and abandoned buildings within our county.
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The Harford County Liquor Control Board administers and enforces the provisions of the Alcoholic Beverage Laws as they are contained in Article 2B of the Annotated Code of Maryland and the Rules and Regulations of the Liquor Control Board.
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The Planning and Zoning Department oversees permits, environmental planning and maps.
The Department of Procurement exists to provide an optimum procurement process ensuring integrity and transparency by promoting broad competition while utilizing collaborative, strategic and cost efficient methods in a timely manner to achieve maximum value of tax dollars for quality goods and services, including Capital Projects.
Zoning Appeals
The Board of Appeals is the Harford County Council who have delegated their authority to a Hearing Examiner. The Hearing Examiner's decision is final unless appealed.


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Bay Foundation cites nutrient pollution as big threat to smallmouth bass
Excess nutrients are making the sport fish more susceptible to infections and death.
Over the past decade, smallmouth bass in five Chesapeake Bay tributaries have suffered from fish kills and perplexing illnesses—and nutrient pollution could be to blame.
According to a new report from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation (CBF), excess nitrogen and phosphorous in our rivers and streams could be behind two of the leading problems affecting smallmouth bass: first, the rapid growth of fish parasites and their hosts, and second, the expansion of large algae blooms that can lead to low-oxygen conditions and spikes in pH. When paired with rising water temperatures and ever more prevalent chemical contaminants, nutrient pollution seems to have created a "perfect storm" of factors that are making smallmouth bass more susceptible to infections and death.
Image courtesy Mr. OutdoorGuy/Flickr
In a media call, CBF President Will Baker called the smallmouth bass "the canary in the coal mine for the Bay's rivers." Because the fish is sensitive to pollution, problems within the population could indicate problems within the Bay.
Smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna, Monocacy, Shenandoah, Cowpasture and South Branch of the Potomac rivers have seen a string of recent health problems, from open sores and wart-like growths to abnormal sexual development. In the Susquehanna, smallmouth bass populations have plummeted so far that Pennsylvania has made it illegal to catch the fish during spawning season.
"Our fish are sick, our anglers are mad and my board and I—protectors of our [smallmouth bass] fishery—are frustrated," said John Arway, executive director of the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission. "Our bass, and our grandchildren who will fish for them, are depending on us to fix the problem."
Image courtesy CBF
While specific causes of smallmouth bass fish kills and illnesses remain unclear, CBF has called on state and local governments to accelerate their pollution-reduction efforts in hopes of improving water quality and saving the driving force behind a $630 million recreational fishing industry. The non-profit has also called on the federal government to designate a 98-mile stretch of the Susquehanna as impaired, which would commit Pennsylvania to reversing the river's decline.
"This is the moment in time to save fishing in our streams and rivers, as well as the jobs and quality of life that are connected to it," Baker said.
Read more about Angling for Healthier Rivers: The Link Between Smallmouth Bass Mortality and Disease and the Need to Reduce Water Pollution in Chesapeake Bay Tributaries.


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WWE Superstar Roman Reigns of The Shield recently spoke to the Busted Open radio show.
On being the only member of The Shield to beat CM Punk; if there are any cracks in The Shield: "The match as far as me beating CM Punk that's-- that's something everybody's going to have to get used to. Me taking down a lot of the top superstars, on my own. As far as cracks in The Shield--you know I don't see it as a "weak link" type thing. I think the match up, you know like; it's a very similar match up between Seth Rollins, Dean Ambrose and CM Punk. They're all very technical-sound wrestlers. I bring something a bit different to the table. I'm a heavy hitting brawler. CM Punk tried to go toe-to-toe with me in that regard and it failed for him."
On if he looks at himself as a standout member of The Shield since being voted Most Improved Wrester by the Busted Open Nation: "I don't look at it too much--read into that type of stuff too much but I do agree with it; you know what I'm saying? When you wrestle as much we do; we like to consider ourselves the backbone of the company. Without us, all these dates that we're able to do; they're just not going to be possible. We're the guys that do the dirty work. We're there every single day. We don't miss a show. There's no weekends off for us. So I think that's a huge contribution to my improvement. Anytime you can work on your craft; week in and week out; and focus on it, you're gonna get better at anything. So for me, it was just apart of the process. Traveling with Seth and Dean, wrestling everyday with those guys; your grandma could get better at wrestling if she was able to do that."
On what would be his focus if he were to find himself next to his partners in the Royal Rumble: "Oh that's simple. We're all in there together. Nothing changes for us. It's business as usual. We're gonna eliminate everybody and we're going to do it with the most efficient teamwork possible. And then once we get to where it's us three we're gonna have to figure that out then. The gloves may come off or maybe we'll make a stand. Maybe we'll do something no one's ever done before. We walk out of that sucker; who knows? That's gonna have to be up to everybody to tune in and pay attention. Cause we're gonna put on a good show."
On what is his goal for 2014: "I think just to stay on the track that I'm on. Continue to dominate in these singles opportunities I get. And then when the right opportunity presents itself, I'd like to capture a singles title. There's plenty of room in The Shield for another singles title; if not two more. I know Seth is thinking the exact same thing. And that's what makes us money is we're all on the same page as far as where we're trying to go. If you're not trying to climb to the top; if you're not on that ladder; you're in trouble, man. You might as well just stay over there by the water cooler and watch us dominate. So if we can get a couple of singles titles along with that US title; that'll be key for us in 2014."
His thoughts on the WWE Network: "I mean just groundbreaking stuff. This is something for a damn near century we've been working towards. Since pro wrestling started and then evolved into Sports Entertainment. This is kind of what we've been pushing towards for years and years now. For the WWE, that was really the next step; to broadcast and advertise under our own name. So it's a big, big moment for our company. And I'm sure nothing but the best is lined up in our future."
His thoughts on possibly being the "face" of the company in 2014: "I don't know about the "face" of the company. That's kind of being used right now. I'd like to come up with something a little more fresh. You know Randy Orton is doing that whole "face" of the company thing. I think I'm better than him so if we can get a one upper situation, that's---maybe the "backbone" of the company. Maybe the "balls" of the company. Something cool like that, you know? I don't know about the "face" of the company. Maybe the "man" of the company. That sounds about right."
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